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Building AI for the $650B Home Services Market

Broccoli (YC W22) is building an AI front office for home services businesses, answering calls, following up with leads, and booking appointments across voice and text. Today, they serve more than 500 customers, are booking jobs at a run rate of over $1 billion a year, and expect to end the year at more than $60 million in ARR, up from zero just two years ago, after recently raising a $30 million Series B. In this Founder Fireside, Broccoli’s founders AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar join YC's Gustaf Alstromer to share the long path to finding that business, from an earlier EV startup that never found product-market fit to visiting 140 contractors across the Bay Area to understand their biggest problems firsthand. They explain how embedding inside a plumbing company led to the first version of Broccoli, why answering missed calls became the wedge, and how AI could eventually reshape the work of technicians themselves. https://www.broccoli.com Chapters: 00:00 — What Broccoli Does 01:30 — The Long Road to YC 04:22 — Building Telematica in the Wrong Market 07:11 — Why the First Idea Didn’t Work 09:27 — Finding the Right Customer 11:13 — Going Door to Door 14:49 — Discovering the Real Problem 17:53 — Getting the First Customers 19:11 — The First Version of Broccoli 20:50 — What Product-Market Fit Felt Like 23:09 — Scaling to $60M ARR 26:19 — How AI Will Change the Trades Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Gustaf AlstromerhostAJ JainguestAditya Ketkarguest
Oct 29, 202631mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Broccoli’s AI front office for trades, found through door-to-door learning

  1. Broccoli automates the front office for trades businesses by using AI to answer calls, follow up on leads, and schedule appointments across voice, text, and SMS.
  2. The founders describe a long path through multiple ideas and YC applications, including Telematica, an EV API business that struggled because the consumer-level incentive and adoption weren’t strong enough.
  3. They found the home-services opportunity by embedding with contractors, conducting extensive door-to-door customer discovery, and identifying after-hours call handling as a top pain tied directly to lost revenue.
  4. They built the first product inside a plumbing business, launched quickly with close monitoring, and saw performance that led the customer to cancel a traditional answering service and generate referrals.
  5. As Broccoli scales (75 people, 500+ customers), the team emphasizes leadership hiring, preserving engineering velocity and culture, and keeping engineers close to real customer environments.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Broccoli frames its product as end-to-end front-office automation for home services.

AJ Jain says Broccoli’s AI answers customer calls, follows up on leads, and schedules appointments across voice, text, and SMS, positioning it as “front office” automation for trades businesses.

The company describes a rapid jump from zero revenue to large-scale traction.

AJ Jain says they serve 500+ customers, are booking AI-run-rate of over a billion dollars in jobs for customers, and expect to end the year at over $60M ARR after being at $0 revenue two years prior.

A technically strong idea failed because the end-user incentive wasn’t compelling enough.

AJ Jain explains Telematica’s core use case in Norway: using EV APIs for demand response by controlling charging based on renewable supply; he says it failed because consumer savings were small and the tradeoff (not having a charged car) was too painful.

Their pivot criteria centered on market size and urgency of the pain.

AJ Jain says they used Telematica to learn a selection rule for their next business: pick a massive market immediately and solve the customer’s most painful problem, not a lower-priority one.

Positioning and trust-building determined whether customer discovery worked.

AJ Jain recounts that door-to-door outreach initially failed when they pitched as “AI startup founders,” but succeeded when they approached as “students” seeking to learn; this unlocked ~8 conversations/day and 140 contractor interviews.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

So Broccoli today automates their entire front office. So the AI answers all their customer calls, follows up on leads, schedules those appointments, and we do this across voice, text, and SMS.

— AJ Jain

But if you look at the economics, uh, from a consumer point of view, you're saving maybe 50 bucks a year. It's not exciting enough when somebody's gonna remotely control your charging.

— AJ Jain

We never wrote a single line of code in San Francisco. It was in a plumber's shop.

— AJ Jain

I think that is maybe what product market fit feels like.

— AJ Jain

Today, Broccoli is basically automating the work around the work.

— AJ Jain

AI call answering and appointment bookingPivoting from EV APIs (Telematica)Customer discovery via door-to-door visitsAfter-hours lead capture and answering servicesEmbedding with a first customer to build productReferrals and early product-market fit signalsScaling culture, velocity, and leadership team

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